Disappointed with KDE 4's performance and other shortcomings, Timothy Pearson continued KDE 3.5 development under the name Trinity. Today the first third major update of the Trinity Desktop Environment is released, providing an alternative upgrade path for KDE users who do not feel comfortable with KDE 4.

hmm, I am running a quad core 2 with a ATI graphics card using the open source drivers and I don't have any crashes and the kwin accelerated performance is outstanding. This is on Chakra(Arch) linux by the way.

Before Chakra I was running the latest KDE 4.x on Ubuntu and that worked fine also.

hmm, I am running a quad core 2 with a ATI graphics card using the open source drivers and I don't have any crashes and the kwin accelerated performance is outstanding. This is on Chakra(Arch) linux by the way. Before Chakra I was running the latest KDE 4.x on Ubuntu and that worked fine also.

Exactly so. If your machine has a working graphics layer, then kwin performance (in and of itself) is fine. I wouldn't have claimed it was "outstanding", I would have simply described it as "perfectly fine", but that could be because I run KDE4 on far lower spec hardware than yours or Thom's.